Like this:

These photos were taken while on a Rockfax trip to South of France to create the new Haute Province climbing guide book which is due out in Spring 2011. I spent two weeks with Adrian Berry, a professional climbing coach, and other climbers from UKClimbing.com, and helped with the photography of the routes in Russan, Claret and Seyenes. It was my first taste of climbing photography and there certainly is a knack to it!

I greatly enjoyed my time there, and looking back over the images, makes me want to get back out on the end of the rope and take more photographs and get better at it.

The last picture shows me on the rope working. I was hanging 2meters free from the rock and had to have an additional Gri-Gri on my harness, which had a length of dead rope attached to the bolt on the rock by a quickdraw, (visible at the 1 o’clock position) so I could adjust my distance from the face of the rock without compromising safety.

Reading Alexandre Buisses’ blog, a very good mountaineer and an adventure photographer, he gives one crucial piece of advice “Get your photos out there”. And one way to do this, he advises, is by setting up a blog and publishing a picture everyday:

“Get your photos out there. But even more: publish at least one new picture every day, no matter how crappy, no matter how tired you are, no matter that no one except two friends and your mom ever look at them.

The “daily” part is crucial. There are plenty of people with photoblogs who publish once in a while when they feel that they have a good image, but that is not enough. You should force yourself to go dig in your archives and find that hidden gem, or simply that decent image you had forgotten about. That will make you a better critic, force you to go through the editing process, find out what works and what doesn’t in your images. It will also force you to go out and shoot when your archives have really run dry.”

So I did just that – dived head first (figuratively speaking) into my archive of photos and found this gem: Taken in 2008 on Coney Island, NY.